OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Two-stage Denoising Diffusion Model for Source Localization in Graph Inverse Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Source localization is the inverse problem of graph information dissemination and has broad practical applications. However, the inherent intricacy and uncertainty in information dissemination pose significant challenges, and the ill-posed nature of the source localization problem further exacerbates these challenges. Recently, deep generative models, particularly diffusion models inspired by classical non-equilibrium thermodynamics, have made significant progress. While diffusion models have proven to be powerful in solving inverse problems and producing high-quality reconstructions, applying them directly to the source localization is infeasible for two reasons. Firstly, it is impossible to calculate the posterior disseminated results on a large-scale network for iterative denoising sampling, which would incur enormous computational costs. Secondly, in the existing methods for this field, the training data itself are ill-posed (many-to-one); thus simply transferring the diffusion model would only lead to local optima. To address these challenges, we propose a two-stage optimization framework, the source localization denoising diffusion model (SL-Diff). In the coarse stage, we devise the source proximity degrees as the supervised signals to generate coarse-grained source predictions. This aims to efficiently initialize the next stage, significantly reducing its convergence time and calibrating the convergence process. Furthermore, the introduction of cascade temporal information in this training method transforms the many-to-one mapping relationship into a one-to-one relationship, perfectly addressing the ill-posed problem. In the fine stage, we design a diffusion model for the graph inverse problem that can quantify the uncertainty in the dissemination. The proposed SL-Diff yields excellent prediction results within a reasonable sampling time at extensive experiments.
Romanization-based Large-scale Adaptation of Multilingual Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Large multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) have become the de facto state of the art for cross-lingual transfer in NLP. However, their large-scale deployment to many languages, besides pretraining data scarcity, is also hindered by the increase in vocabulary size and limitations in their parameter budget. In order to boost the capacity of mPLMs to deal with low-resource and unseen languages, we explore the potential of leveraging transliteration on a massive scale. In particular, we explore the UROMAN transliteration tool, which provides mappings from UTF-8 to Latin characters for all the writing systems, enabling inexpensive romanization for virtually any language. We first focus on establishing how UROMAN compares against other language-specific and manually curated transliterators for adapting multilingual PLMs. We then study and compare a plethora of data- and parameter-efficient strategies for adapting the mPLMs to romanized and non-romanized corpora of 14 diverse low-resource languages. Our results reveal that UROMAN-based transliteration can offer strong performance for many languages, with particular gains achieved in the most challenging setups: on languages with unseen scripts and with limited training data without any vocabulary augmentation. Further analyses reveal that an improved tokenizer based on romanized data can even outperform non-transliteration-based methods in the majority of languages.
Computational and Exploratory Landscape Analysis of the GKLS Generator
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

The GKLS generator is one of the most used testbeds for benchmarking global optimization algorithms. In this paper, we conduct both a computational analysis and the Exploratory Landscape Analysis (ELA) of the GKLS generator. We utilize both canonically used and newly generated classes of GKLS-generated problems and show their use in benchmarking three state-of-the-art methods (from evolutionary and deterministic communities) in dimensions 5 and 10. We show that the GKLS generator produces ``needle in a haystack'' type problems that become extremely difficult to optimize in higher dimensions. Furthermore, we conduct the ELA on the GKLS generator and then compare it to the ELA of two other widely used benchmark sets (BBOB and CEC 2014), and discuss the meaningfulness of the results.
Questioning the impact of AI and interdisciplinarity in science: Lessons from COVID-19
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as one of the most promising technologies to support COVID-19 research, with interdisciplinary collaborations between medical professionals and AI specialists being actively encouraged since the early stages of the pandemic. Yet, our analysis of more than 10,000 papers at the intersection of COVID-19 and AI suggest that these collaborations have largely resulted in science of low visibility and impact. We show that scientific impact was not determined by the overall interdisciplinarity of author teams, but rather by the diversity of knowledge they actually harnessed in their research. Our results provide insights into the ways in which team and knowledge structure may influence the successful integration of new computational technologies in the sciences.
Quantum Annealing for Single Image Super-Resolution
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This paper proposes a quantum computing-based algorithm to solve the single image super-resolution (SISR) problem. One of the well-known classical approaches for SISR relies on the well-established patch-wise sparse modeling of the problem. Yet, this field's current state of affairs is that deep neural networks (DNNs) have demonstrated far superior results than traditional approaches. Nevertheless, quantum computing is expected to become increasingly prominent for machine learning problems soon. As a result, in this work, we take the privilege to perform an early exploration of applying a quantum computing algorithm to this important image enhancement problem, i.e., SISR. Among the two paradigms of quantum computing, namely universal gate quantum computing and adiabatic quantum computing (AQC), the latter has been successfully applied to practical computer vision problems, in which quantum parallelism has been exploited to solve combinatorial optimization efficiently. This work demonstrates formulating quantum SISR as a sparse coding optimization problem, which is solved using quantum annealers accessed via the D-Wave Leap platform. The proposed AQC-based algorithm is demonstrated to achieve improved speed-up over a classical analog while maintaining comparable SISR accuracy.
ProGAP: Progressive Graph Neural Networks with Differential Privacy Guarantees
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become a popular tool for learning on graphs, but their widespread use raises privacy concerns as graph data can contain personal or sensitive information. Differentially private GNN models have been recently proposed to preserve privacy while still allowing for effective learning over graph-structured datasets. However, achieving an ideal balance between accuracy and privacy in GNNs remains challenging due to the intrinsic structural connectivity of graphs. In this paper, we propose a new differentially private GNN called ProGAP that uses a progressive training scheme to improve such accuracy-privacy trade-offs. Combined with the aggregation perturbation technique to ensure differential privacy, ProGAP splits a GNN into a sequence of overlapping submodels that are trained progressively, expanding from the first submodel to the complete model. Specifically, each submodel is trained over the privately aggregated node embeddings learned and cached by the previous submodels, leading to an increased expressive power compared to previous approaches while limiting the incurred privacy costs. We formally prove that ProGAP ensures edge-level and node-level privacy guarantees for both training and inference stages, and evaluate its performance on benchmark graph datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that ProGAP can achieve up to 5-10% higher accuracy than existing state-of-the-art differentially private GNNs. Our code is available at https://github.com/sisaman/ProGAP.
The ABC of Pair Programming: Gender-dependent Attitude, Behavior and Code of Young Learners
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Young learners are increasingly introduced to programming, and one of the main challenges for educators is to achieve learning success while also creating enthusiasm. As it is particularly difficult to achieve this enthusiasm initially in young females, prior work has identified gender-specific differences in the programming behavior of young learners. Since pair programming, which turns programming into a more sociable activity, has been proposed as an approach to support programming education, in this paper we aim to investigate whether similar gender-specific characteristics can also be observed during pair programming. Therefore, we designed a gender-neutral introductory SCRATCH programming course tailored for integrating pair programming principles, and conducted it with a total of 139 students aged between 8 and 14 years. To identify gender-dependent differences and similarities, we measure the attitude towards programming and the course setting, observe the behavior of the students while programming, and analyze the code of the programs for different gender-combinations. Overall, our study demonstrates that pair programming is well suited for young learners and results in a positive attitude. While the resulting programs are similar in quality and complexity independent of gender, differences are evident when it comes to the compliance to pair programming roles, the exploration of code, and the creative customization of programs. These findings contribute to an in-depth understanding of social and technical gender specifics of pair programming, and provide educators with resources and guidance for implementing gender-sensitive pair programming in the classroom.
All a-board: sharing educational data science research with school districts
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Educational data scientists often conduct research with the hopes of translating findings into lasting change through policy, civil society, or other channels. However, the bridge from research to practice can be fraught with sociopolitical frictions that impede, or altogether block, such translations -- especially when they are contentious or otherwise difficult to achieve. Focusing on one entrenched educational equity issue in US public schools -- racial and ethnic segregation -- we conduct randomized email outreach experiments and surveys to explore how local school districts respond to algorithmically-generated school catchment areas ("attendance boundaries") designed to foster more diverse and integrated schools. Cold email outreach to approximately 4,320 elected school board members across over 800 school districts informing them of potential boundary changes reveals a large average open rate of nearly 40%, but a relatively small click-through rate of 2.5% to an interactive dashboard depicting such changes. Board members, however, appear responsive to different messaging techniques -- particularly those that dovetail issues of racial and ethnic diversity with other top-of-mind issues (like school capacity planning). On the other hand, media coverage of the research drives more dashboard engagement, especially in more segregated districts. A small but rich set of survey responses from school board and community members across several districts identify data and operational bottlenecks to implementing boundary changes to foster more diverse schools, but also share affirmative comments on the potential viability of such changes. Together, our findings may support educational data scientists in more effectively disseminating research that aims to bridge educational inequalities through systems-level change.
Stochastic Parrots Looking for Stochastic Parrots: LLMs are Easy to Fine-Tune and Hard to Detect with other LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The self-attention revolution allowed generative language models to scale and achieve increasingly impressive abilities. Such models - commonly referred to as Large Language Models (LLMs) - have recently gained prominence with the general public, thanks to conversational fine-tuning, putting their behavior in line with public expectations regarding AI. This prominence amplified prior concerns regarding the misuse of LLMs and led to the emergence of numerous tools to detect LLMs in the wild. Unfortunately, most such tools are critically flawed. While major publications in the LLM detectability field suggested that LLMs were easy to detect with fine-tuned autoencoders, the limitations of their results are easy to overlook. Specifically, they assumed publicly available generative models without fine-tunes or non-trivial prompts. While the importance of these assumptions has been demonstrated, until now, it remained unclear how well such detection could be countered. Here, we show that an attacker with access to such detectors' reference human texts and output not only evades detection but can fully frustrate the detector training - with a reasonable budget and all its outputs labeled as such. Achieving it required combining common "reinforcement from critic" loss function modification and AdamW optimizer, which led to surprisingly good fine-tuning generalization. Finally, we warn against the temptation to transpose the conclusions obtained in RNN-driven text GANs to LLMs due to their better representative ability. These results have critical implications for the detection and prevention of malicious use of generative language models, and we hope they will aid the designers of generative models and detectors.
Neural Architecture Search for Visual Anomaly Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents the first application of neural architecture search to the complex task of segmenting visual anomalies. Measurement of anomaly segmentation performance is challenging due to imbalanced anomaly pixels, varying region areas, and various types of anomalies. First, the region-weighted Average Precision (rwAP) metric is proposed as an alternative to existing metrics, which does not need to be limited to a specific maximum false positive rate. Second, the AutoPatch neural architecture search method is proposed, which enables efficient segmentation of visual anomalies without any training. By leveraging a pre-trained supernet, a black-box optimization algorithm can directly minimize computational complexity and maximize performance on a small validation set of anomalous examples. Finally, compelling results are presented on the widely studied MVTec dataset, demonstrating that AutoPatch outperforms the current state-of-the-art with lower computational complexity, using only one example per type of anomaly. The results highlight the potential of automated machine learning to optimize throughput in industrial quality control. The code for AutoPatch is available at: https://github.com/tommiekerssies/AutoPatch
In ChatGPT We Trust? Measuring and Characterizing the Reliability of ChatGPT
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

The way users acquire information is undergoing a paradigm shift with the advent of ChatGPT. Unlike conventional search engines, ChatGPT retrieves knowledge from the model itself and generates answers for users. ChatGPT's impressive question-answering (QA) capability has attracted more than 100 million users within a short period of time but has also raised concerns regarding its reliability. In this paper, we perform the first large-scale measurement of ChatGPT's reliability in the generic QA scenario with a carefully curated set of 5,695 questions across ten datasets and eight domains. We find that ChatGPT's reliability varies across different domains, especially underperforming in law and science questions. We also demonstrate that system roles, originally designed by OpenAI to allow users to steer ChatGPT's behavior, can impact ChatGPT's reliability in an imperceptible way. We further show that ChatGPT is vulnerable to adversarial examples, and even a single character change can negatively affect its reliability in certain cases. We believe that our study provides valuable insights into ChatGPT's reliability and underscores the need for strengthening the reliability and security of large language models (LLMs).
D2CSE: Difference-aware Deep continuous prompts for Contrastive Sentence Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

This paper describes Difference-aware Deep continuous prompt for Contrastive Sentence Embeddings (D2CSE) that learns sentence embeddings. Compared to state-of-the-art approaches, D2CSE computes sentence vectors that are exceptional to distinguish a subtle difference in similar sentences by employing a simple neural architecture for continuous prompts. Unlike existing architectures that require multiple pretrained language models (PLMs) to process a pair of the original and corrupted (subtly modified) sentences, D2CSE avoids cumbersome fine-tuning of multiple PLMs by only optimizing continuous prompts by performing multiple tasks -- i.e., contrastive learning and conditional replaced token detection all done in a self-guided manner. D2CSE overloads a single PLM on continuous prompts and greatly saves memory consumption as a result. The number of training parameters in D2CSE is reduced to about 1\% of existing approaches while substantially improving the quality of sentence embeddings. We evaluate D2CSE on seven Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) benchmarks, using three different metrics, namely, Spearman's rank correlation, recall@K for a retrieval task, and the anisotropy of an embedding space measured in alignment and uniformity. Our empirical results suggest that shallow (not too meticulously devised) continuous prompts can be honed effectively for multiple NLP tasks and lead to improvements upon existing state-of-the-art approaches.
Joint Age-based Client Selection and Resource Allocation for Communication-Efficient Federated Learning over NOMA Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In federated learning (FL), distributed clients can collaboratively train a shared global model while retaining their own training data locally. Nevertheless, the performance of FL is often limited by the slow convergence due to poor communications links when FL is deployed over wireless networks. Due to the scarceness of radio resources, it is crucial to select clients precisely and allocate communication resource accurately for enhancing FL performance. To address these challenges, in this paper, a joint optimization problem of client selection and resource allocation is formulated, aiming to minimize the total time consumption of each round in FL over a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) enabled wireless network. Specifically, considering the staleness of the local FL models, we propose an age of update (AoU) based novel client selection scheme. Subsequently, the closed-form expressions for resource allocation are derived by monotonicity analysis and dual decomposition method. In addition, a server-side artificial neural network (ANN) is proposed to predict the FL models of clients who are not selected at each round to further improve FL performance. Finally, extensive simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed schemes over FL performance, average AoU and total time consumption.
A Biomedical Entity Extraction Pipeline for Oncology Health Records in Portuguese
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Textual health records of cancer patients are usually protracted and highly unstructured, making it very time-consuming for health professionals to get a complete overview of the patient's therapeutic course. As such limitations can lead to suboptimal and/or inefficient treatment procedures, healthcare providers would greatly benefit from a system that effectively summarizes the information of those records. With the advent of deep neural models, this objective has been partially attained for English clinical texts, however, the research community still lacks an effective solution for languages with limited resources. In this paper, we present the approach we developed to extract procedures, drugs, and diseases from oncology health records written in European Portuguese. This project was conducted in collaboration with the Portuguese Institute for Oncology which, besides holding over $10$ years of duly protected medical records, also provided oncologist expertise throughout the development of the project. Since there is no annotated corpus for biomedical entity extraction in Portuguese, we also present the strategy we followed in annotating the corpus for the development of the models. The final models, which combined a neural architecture with entity linking, achieved $F_1$ scores of $88.6$, $95.0$, and $55.8$ per cent in the mention extraction of procedures, drugs, and diseases, respectively.
Towards a Benchmark for Fog Data Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

Fog data processing systems provide key abstractions to manage data and event processing in the geo-distributed and heterogeneous fog environment. The lack of standardized benchmarks for such systems, however, hinders their development and deployment, as different approaches cannot be compared quantitatively. Existing cloud data benchmarks are inadequate for fog computing, as their focus on workload specification ignores the tight integration of application and infrastructure inherent in fog computing. In this paper, we outline an approach to a fog-native data processing benchmark that combines workload specifications with infrastructure specifications. This holistic approach allows researchers and engineers to quantify how a software approach performs for a given workload on given infrastructure. Further, by basing our benchmark in a realistic IoT sensor network scenario, we can combine paradigms such as low-latency event processing, machine learning inference, and offline data analytics, and analyze the performance impact of their interplay in a fog data processing system.
DeepGEMM: Accelerated Ultra Low-Precision Inference on CPU Architectures using Lookup Tables
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

A lot of recent progress has been made in ultra low-bit quantization, promising significant improvements in latency, memory footprint and energy consumption on edge devices. Quantization methods such as Learned Step Size Quantization can achieve model accuracy that is comparable to full-precision floating-point baselines even with sub-byte quantization. However, it is extremely challenging to deploy these ultra low-bit quantized models on mainstream CPU devices because commodity SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) hardware typically supports no less than 8-bit precision. To overcome this limitation, we propose DeepGEMM, a lookup table based approach for the execution of ultra low-precision convolutional neural networks on SIMD hardware. The proposed method precomputes all possible products of weights and activations, stores them in a lookup table, and efficiently accesses them at inference time to avoid costly multiply-accumulate operations. Our 2-bit implementation outperforms corresponding 8-bit integer kernels in the QNNPACK framework by up to 1.74x on x86 platforms.